Immigration policies based on racism and junk science like evils of eugenics cause harm to generations of innocent people

Echo report published in the Times Union  newspaper, published in the North Country of the Adirondack Mountains, New York.

In the North Country, fear of the 'other': French Canadians in the Adirondacks once faced hatred and discrimination. Considering their history may help us see today's hostility toward migrants in a new light.  By Jason L. Newton

French phrase for "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose". 

On February 18, 2025, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "ICE") agents detained nine immigrants working at Tupper Lake Pine Mill in the Adirondacks and scheduled them for deportation. ICE said the workers were in the country illegally, though lumber mill officials said they had met all work eligibility requirements.

This raid was surprising: Tupper Lake is not an immigration hub, and while the lumber industry persists in the Adirondacks, the region is now known more for its logging restrictions.

Yet, logging has been an ever-present part of regional history and once drew immigrants from across the globe. A look at the history of the Adirondacks affirms that immigrants have been essential to the economy and have positively shaped regional and national culture.
Immigrant workers are embedded in the traditions of the Adirondacks. In Tupper Lake there is an 11-foot tall lumberjack statue, the school mascot is the lumberjack, and the baseball team is the Riverpigs, a moniker for log drivers. The workers that created this venerated lumberjack, the embodiment of strength, hardiness and determination, came largely from the Adirondack’s northerly neighbor, Quebec.

In 1870 about 24% of residents of Franklin County, where Tupper Lake is located, were foreign born. 

Into the 1920s, about one in 10 were Canadian and probably half of them were French Canadian. 

During this period, there were consistently about 3,000 French Canadians in the county. And not all this historical immigration was legal. Into the 1920s, the border was lightly policed. Americans and Canadians crossed at will.

In the 1900s, my great-great grandfather Louis Auguste Deschene and his wife, Anna, made this journey from Quebec to the Adirondacks. He Americanized his name to Angus and in 1910, was living in a lumber camp in Fine, New York, with Anna, five children and four workers. Angus’ son Ernest became a logger and settled in Tupper, and my grandmother Delia spent time in logging camps.
Though it seems strange now, there was a time when these French Canadians, like immigrants today, were not welcomed.

The time of high immigration to Franklin was the apex of eugenics, the powerful but pseudoscientific study of racial difference that is now fully discredited. 

People like the Deschenes were not initially considered to be “white” people, according to immigration experts and the public. Eugenicists argued that the French developed differently than other Euro-Americans: They retained medieval traits and a primitive dialect, and had an innate predilection to Catholicism. Their often-reported “swarthy” complexion was evidence of inferiority and intermingling with Native Americans.

In 1881, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics declared the French Canadians “the Chinese of the Eastern States” — a damming comparison because that year, the U.S. was debating the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. In 1904, the Watertown Re-Union newspaper did an exposé on Adirondack lumbering, declaring that “these French-Canadian inhabitants of the woods are half-wild folk.” 

The paper depicted immigrant children as sickly, barefooted “untamed creatures” and “caged animals.” Eugenicist and historian Madison Grant wrote in a 1916 book that French Canadians were “a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes in the South.”

Building off this type of “evidence,” in 1919 the state of Maine banned the use of French as the primary language of instruction in public and private schools. In 1924 the Ku Klux Klan intimidated union members who were organizing French Canadian lumber workers in Maine. A year earlier a Klan member addressed a crowd in that state, declaring, “This is not a Catholic nation.”

Claims of racial difference justified poor treatment and low wages for French Canadians. In the Adirondacks, three lumber companies — Emporium, Santa Clara and A. Sherman — conspired to set low wages for French Canadians. They were shot by bosses in logging camps, disciplined by force and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet French Canadians helped New York become the second most productive state in pulp wood production by 1920.

Industrial dependency on French Canadians became a government-sponsored contract labor program during World War II, similar to the Bracero Program for Mexican agricultural workers. French Canadians were “bonded” to one American employer for a six-month logging season. Employers could order workers by filing the “Woodsman Order Form.” 

The program continued after the war, and between 1951, and 1955, about 6,000 French Canadian workers were “bonded” to Northeastern logging companies each year.

Like the Mexican “Braceros,” French Canadians endured unbearable conditions. A Senate investigation found eight Canadians living in a dirt floor shack alongside horses in winter. Others were housed in an “abandoned bus.” A Maine logger wrote, “You can make them work harder [than Americans]. They will live under worse conditions.”

Another said, “I think we agree … [the French Canadian] has been exploited. … He knows he is not loved.”

There is a pattern in American immigration history: Racism drives fear and disdain of immigrants, forcing them to accept low wages and poor conditions. Industries become dependent on low wages, furthering native workers’ disdain of foreigners. The French Canadian example is important because through hindsight, it shows how ridiculous these types of racial divisions are.
Today some Americans see Latin Americans as racially and ethnically different from “white” Americans. 

But history shows that whiteness as a racial category has no historical or scientific mooring. For example, between 1850, and 1920, the census counted most Mexicans as "white."

The Trump administration’s mass-deportation promise forces those interested in history to ask: What would the Adirondacks be like today if Americans had banned French Canadians like we did the Chinese? What would the Northeast be like if the KKK had abolished Catholicism? 

If we can entertain these hypotheticals, we can ask what today’s immigrants will add to Adirondack history. Might future generations carve statues depicting them? What will the children of immigrant workers become?

If the Trump administration succeeds in spreading race-based division, if they end birthright citizenship and expel immigrant workers, what will future Americans think of people today who allowed this? Through our actions today — capitulation or resistance — we will shape future history. What do we want the future of the Adirondacks — and of America — to be?